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A strawberry is a flowering plant of Fragaria, in Rosaceae, and the name also denotes its familiar edible structure. That structure is an aggregate accessory fruit: the fleshy portion is an enlarged receptacle, bearing numerous small achenes. The objects commonly called its “seeds” are therefore individual dry fruits, each enclosing a seed.^[ref]

A 1984 experiment connected those small fruits to growth of the surrounding flesh. Investigators grew the Ozark Beauty cultivar in greenhouse pots, hand-pollinated fully open flowers, and used the pollination date to measure developmental age. Removing achenes stopped growth; applying a synthetic auxin restarted it. The researchers also compared the proteins present at different stages using gel separation, linking the growth treatment to changes in the tissue's protein pattern.^[ref]

The removal-and-rescue comparison is more informative than merely noticing that large berries have many achenes. Removal changes a putative source of a growth signal; rescue tests whether an added signal can substitute for it. The result supports hormonal coordination between developing seed-bearing structures and the receptacle, rather than treating the flesh as an independently growing container.

Tobias Nicolas Rojas led a study testing whether combinations of fleshy-fruit traits predict the animals that disperse their seeds. The researchers measured traits of 134 species and compared these with documented fruit–disperser interactions. Separating morphological, chemical and visual traits allowed the proposed seed dispersal syndrome to be tested as a pattern, rather than assumed from a few familiar examples.^[ref]

For example, a strong relationship between fruit mass and diameter need not imply equally strong relationships with chemical traits. The study connects field observations to a specific question in ecology: how reliably can an interaction partner be inferred from an organism's measured features?

The tomato is the flowering plant Solanum lycopersicum and its fleshy fruit. It is useful for investigating fruit growth and ripening because changes in tissue structure, pigmentation and chemistry can be related across biological development.